Don’t Blink: The Shortest SimCity Trailer

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There isn’t a lot to this SimCity trailer, which EA are bafflingly calling in an “Introduction”, as if we hadn’t already been talking about the game for a year already. Or did I just imagine all that? I could check, but I like to live life on the edge. For example: I’m writing this article directly into the CMS. This is internet without a safety net. All I have are my wits, the inbuilt spellchecker in Firefox (Chrome and WordPress do not get along), and a desire to crank things up a notch. Who’s with me? Let’s gooooo…
Still there? Cool. I felt for sure I was going to storm off and you’d stand back and giggle. Welcome the the second paragraph, otherwise known as the party paragraph. Let’s kick off with a bit of a dance to to this remix of “Call Me Maybe”. Then pretend we’re all in a room with Microsoft’s bizarre new technology. You might also want to read this blog post over at the SimCity site that details some of the features of running multiple cities. You can have up to 16 in one game. Hey, my parties are educational as well as being off The Hook. Time for the main event. Are you ready? ARE? YOU? READY?

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TRAILERISGONOW.

It’s out on March 5th/8th. You’ll know when that is, because that’s when the party in the second paragraph ends and the fireworks go off.

Im making over $7k a month working part time. I kept hearing other people tell me how much money they can make online so I decided to look into it. Well, it was all true and has totally changed my life. This is what I do..Golden Job

The cities have been really small in every SimCity game. Why do you think this is news? Yes they look a little smaller than the largest region in SimCity 4, but even that was really more a size for SimTown than SimCity.

The metro area I live in is something like the 15th largest in the US, and has two core cities of about 350,000. My city council ward (of which there are 9) wouldn’t fit on SimCity 4’s largest maps, much less one of the two main cities. To even get just the very central most core of the metro would maybe have taken something like 36 maps.

Anyway, because of all that I almost embrace this acceptance of a smaller scale, rather than the older games which were trying to pretend they weren’t SimTown.

Sadly it looks like they still haven’t fixed the problem of the densities being WAY WAY WAY too high for the number of buildings present. A town in the US that has three or four thousand buildings/lots likely doesn’t have a building over 4 stories. That is just how density works.

I would love a city builder someday that tried to stick to actual scales and dynamics, but complaining about the scale issues now when this has always been a feature of these games seems odd.

Now, i don’t know about the other people, but i personally am not complaining about how the cities are small per se. I am complaining about how the map isn’t all covered with regions like in SimCity 4, so the cities exist in sort of a vacuum – skyscrapers and then pristine countryside right over the road. Meanwhile, in SC4 you could build a lot of cities next to eachother so that they form a cohesive whole, skyscrapers declining into residential blocks declining into suburbs declining into wilderness.

Ideally they could ameliorate that by rendering the outlying areas with increasing development as your population grows. So you have your core downtown you are building and while it is 1000 people most of the rest of the map is wilderness/farms, but when it hits 10,000 there is a halo of single family and light commercial development around it instead of undeveloped/farm land, and when it hits 50,000 most of the rest of the map is covered with development and your city sites are just the core business districts/interesting locations within that world.

This would also solve the problem of SimCity 4 where building a realistic metro involved building dozens of extremely boring single family light commercial maps to surround a tiny core of skyscrapers (as it is in reality). People think of New York as all skyscrapers, but it is only the way it is because Connecticut and the surrounding countryside in new york and new jersey are filled with single family homes.

2kmX2km was also the “standard” city size in Sim City 4 and necessary for a lot of players due to hardware issues until the game was better optimized (thankfully not me). Look I am all for a larger scale, but a smaller scale was sort of mandated when they went the detailed simulation route.

You want 8knX8km cities you really shouldn’t even be placing individual lots or simulating individual people or cars. You should be zoning out whole developments. The developers made some choices, it happens. Lets hope they work out.

Frankly it does not matter if people limited by hardware could not reach the max size. The fact remain that in SC4 and up you *could* get much greater city. And that’s not even counting the horror of not being able to reload and experiment, with cloud saving. You might be fine with that all, but the criticism are factual. The new simcity will have much smaller city.

Sounds to me like you really want to love this game… your posts seem more for the purpose of reassuring yourself.

I hope you find what you want when it launches. From where I’m standing though, I has zero merits. Graphics, design, gameplay, scale are all extremely bad. If this was a social or mobile game, I wouldn’t even consider it a good one; let alone a retail pc game.

Add to that zero merit package some online all the time bullshit, and all I can see is a laughable disaster.

I think it is rather that I stand as someone who is against the reflexive negativity you find on game discussion boards. If anything is a remake of a previous game it is guaranteed that 90% of the posts will be negative regardless of the merits of the game.

I think that does a disservice to the discussion and presents an overly pessimistic view of the future. it also comes across as a bunch of people who don’t actually like gaming that much. You head all the exact same wailing and gnashing of teeth in the run-up to the XCOM remake. And while that is not the classic the original was, it was certainly and enjoyable and serviceable game well worth the price.

All these threads about Sim City are just people pointing out every thing they hate about it with no perspective, maturity, or positive attitude. trust me if everyone was on here signing the games praises I would be pointing out what look like weak points. But it hardly needs yet one more voice doing that.

Your comment in particular is just ridiculous and over the top hyperbole.

I couldn’t care less about the “DRM”. That means nothing to 90% of actual paying customers.

On the other hand if they turn it into a little constant stream of garbage DLC and expansions like the half their other games (Sims/Spore/etc.) then that will make me angry. I don’t want to pay for content a modding scene could provide me with in half the time at twice the quality.

I hate this “make the bare skeleton of a game and then ask players to buy ornaments for it at $5 a pop” model the industry uses. If you need $120 a customer to make the entire game just price it at $120 and make something that is complete/cohesive with good modding support. These “bolt-on” games almost always feel soulless. I suspect that having so much of the market be young people means they are wedded to these lower price points unfortunately.

General Greed is given ownership of the Evil Investors by his close ties to Almighty Dollar, evil ruler of the world. The Investors you speak of are a notoriously fickle bunch, demanding predictable and regular returns on their investments, so the General cannot afford to tangle with the famously unpredictable hero Economics. They are also helpless before Public Opinion (or rather his grimdark alter-ego Controversy), lest he wreak havoc on them with the power of share price lowering, which saps their power.

“On the other hand if they turn it into a little constant stream of garbage DLC and expansions like the half their other games (Sims/Spore/etc.) then that will make me angry”

You say “if”, as if there was any chance they won’t be. OF COURSE there is going to be an endless stream of overpriced DLC: histroical building packs, international country packs, specialty bonus buildings. This is the same company that sells $5 clothing or furniture sets for your Sim. The sky is the limit, here.

I don’t need to, because you’ll be regretting your purchase on day 1, once you realize that the servers are overloaded and you won’t be able to play properly for weeks. If you’re smart, you’ll ask for a refund.

I’ve been saying for years – YEARS DAMMIT – that this is my most-wanted game in the world. A new, modern SimCity built on real simulation. I was drooling when they revealed it, but I’m feeling some deep pangs of fear now at what this game may be.

I was so excited about the earliest previews, the basic Galssbox Engine stuff, etc. “Please don’t fuck this up!”, I yelled at the screen, fingers crossed… of course they did. Of course they couldn’t resist Farmvilling and DRMing all over that shit. Sigh. What a waste. I’ve been literally waiting 10 years for this.

“Farmvilling and DRMing” At this point it is not clear either of these things will be a problem. Certainly there are things to be concerned about, but reflexive hate simply because it is EA is kind of silly.

You might give them the benefit of doubt, but many of us don’t anymore. I am guessing here what we say is an attempt to casualize to expand the simcity appeal beyond the simcity lover. Despite their accent on the glas engine, the look and feel they are trying to give in the video reeks to me of sim society. I am not giving them the benefit of doubt, as they are not dispelling any doubt with their marketing (ETA in fact the more they speak up the more it seems a step back with part of the simulation being cut and gone rather than being ameliorated or streamlined. Transport. Terraforming. Water/electricity IIRC). And I am willing to bet there will be a lot of disappointment.

Oh and DRM not being a problem , the dev admitted themselves that you need the connection, the city is saved opnline , and if you lose the connection for too long you are stuffed, your city progress gone. For a game with checkpoint, maybe OK, for an MMO, barely OK, but for a single player simulation, you are KIDDING me ? Furthermore I usually play my SP game while downloading huge patch for MMO games, ubuntu, windows or whatnot, and aprticularly on train while going to work or to my family (long trek). Cannot do that without a connection. So yeah , DRM is definitively a problem for a lot of gameplay situation, beside the playing only this with a prisitine internet connection.

At this point, giving EA the benefit of the doubt would be silly. After so many years of screw ups and anti-consumer practices, it is only natural to doubt them.

The only things EA consistently delivers are disappointment and annoyance.

But no, sounds like you really really really want to love this game. I hope the game turns out the way you want. I hope when you got it, you genuinely enjoy it and don’t have to adapt your likings fit the game, or to justify this and that to argue away the negging feeling in the back of your mind.

Same. I use multisite for my work and we have ~100 active users (journalists, etc). I actually recommend chrome whenever possible over firefox (and DEFINITELY over safari which seems to have lots of trouble with WP).

The one I liked was more or less like this :
dev (paraphrased from memory) “our game will be able to keep the state for a few minute until you get a connection back”
Somebody’s response “I have a hard drive it is perfectely able to keep state of a game forever”